[AutonomousVehicles] Amazon gets deeper into self driving vehicles and ride hailing

[Cornelius Butler]

Hi Fellow Committee Membrs,
Amazon is getting deeper into self driving vehicles and ride hailing. I'm
providing text and the original link below to some recent news about a new
acqisiton b amazon.

Article Link:
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-shakes-self-driving-ride-hailing/

Article Text:
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says his company wants to be the “Amazon for
transportation.” Friday, Amazon made clear that it intends to be the Amazon
for transportation.

The ecommerce giant said it had agreed to acquire Bay Area–based autonomous
vehicle company Zoox, a deal reportedly worth more than $1 billion. (Amazon
did not respond to WIRED's queries.) Since its founding in 2014, Zoox has
been known for its technical chops, its secretiveness, and its sky-high
ambition. While Alphabet's Waymo is focusing on self-driving tech and
leaving the car building to places like Detroit, Zoox has stuck to its plan
to design a robotaxi from the ground up—and operate a ride-hail service. In
2018, it showed off its first prototype vehicles, which look like
sensor-laden golf carts on steroids. The company has also been testing its
software on more conventional-looking Toyota Highlanders in San Francisco,
where it is learning to handle chaotic city streets.

In a press release, Amazon signaled that it will not stray from Zoox’s
formidable self-driving goals. “We’re acquiring Zoox to help bring their
vision of autonomous ride hailing to reality,” it wrote in the headline.
Jeff Wilke, Amazon CEO of global consumer, said in a statement that “Zoox
is working to imagine, invent, and design a world-class autonomous
ride-hailing experience.”

Which means the autonomous-taxi race just got more interesting. Amazon’s
entrance to the space “is an existential threat to Uber and Lyft,” says
Asad Hussain, a mobility tech analyst at the market analytics company
Pitchbook.

In theory, autonomous vehicles and ride-hail services go hand in hand. As
Uber and Lyft struggle to iron out the economics of trips, both continue to
spend millions each year recruiting and retaining drivers. Moves by states
including New York and California to require those drivers to be considered
employees further threaten their business models. A self-driving car
wouldn't need a driver.

But lately, robotaxis have seemed to hit a rut, as the tech has proved more
challenging than tech and auto executives once promised. In the last two
years, well-funded competitors like Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Cruise (a subsidiary
of General Motors), and ArgoAI (which is owned in part by Ford and
Volkswagen) have delayed their timelines for deploying self-driving
vehicles. Amazon acquired Zoox for well below its 2018 valuation of $3.2
billion.

Today, only Waymo is running an commercial, autonomous ride-hail service,
only in the Phoenix metro area, and only occasionally without someone in
the driver's seat monitoring the nascent tech. In 2015, Chris Urmson, a
former Google self-driving head who later cofounded self-driving startup
Aurora, suggested his 11-year-old son might never need a driver’s license;
the son has started learning to drive. Just this week, Aurora signaled it
would shift its focus away from self-driving taxis and toward self-driving
trucks. “If you want to get to market with a safe system quickly, you can
do no better than to start in trucking,” Aurora cofounder Sterling Anderson
said at an event hosted by The Information.
Image may contain: Vehicle, Transportation, Car, Automobile, Sedan, Sports
Car, and Race Car
The WIRED Guide to Self-Driving Cars
How a chaotic skunkworks race in the desert launched what's poised to be a
runaway global industry.

If Amazon pushes ahead with its own ride-hail network using Zoox vehicles,
the company may have some built-in advantages. In a note published a month
ago, after The Wall Street Journal first reported that the Zoox deal was in
the works, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak wrote that the company could
offer discounts to its 100-million-plus Prime members, as it does at Whole
Foods. He also theorized that Amazon could jump ahead of automakers, whose
ability to pay for moon-shot tech like autonomous vehicles has waned during
the Covid-19\–induced recession. “In a post-Covid world, we believe fewer
and more powerful players will be in position to deploy capital and talent
to solving autonomy with a ‘play to win’ mindset,” Nowak wrote.Both Uber
and Lyft have invested in self-driving tech. But despite a $1 billion
infusion last year from Toyota, automotive supplier Denso, and the Softbank
Vision Fund, Uber is still seen as being behind on the technology; it
recently said it will close an artificial intelligence lab. Uber is now
testing self-driving cars in fewer places than it was before a fatal 2018
collision between one of its autonomous vehicles and an Arizona woman. An
executive told CNBC this year that self-driving tech has to move through
development, piloting, and commercialization stages—and that Uber is still
at development.

Lyft, meanwhile, has its own self-driving center in Palo Alto and said this
week that it's making use of data from sensors mounted on a small group of
its ride-hail drivers’ cars to train its robotaxi software. But the company
also has partnered with Aptiv and Waymo to put their self-driving cars on
its network. Hussain says the ride-hail incumbents should seriously
consider making more of those sorts of deals. “As this ecosystem develops,
it makes sense to partner,” he says.

Amazon has made other weighty investments in transportation. It invested in
Aurora a year ago as part of the company’s $530 million Series B round and
has reportedly hauled goods on self-driving trucks with the robotruck
startup Embark. Amazon also led a $700 million investment round into the
electric-truck startup Rivian and last fall announced it would buy 100,000
electric delivery vans from the company by 2030. The company has sunk money
into a secretive (and delayed) drone project and is expanding its aircraft
fleet.

While Amazon’s statements on Friday emphasized self-driving, observers say
they wouldn’t be surprised if the autonomous technology acquired as part of
the Zoox deal shows up in trucks, delivery vans, or warehouse equipment.
After all, Amazon seems to want to be the Amazon for everything.
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